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Which best describes how shared characteristics can be used to identify evolutionary relationships?

If organisms have a common ancestor, most of their characteristics will be shared.
If two organisms have a shared characteristic, it means one evolved from the other.
If organisms have many shared characteristics, they are likely to be closely related.
If organisms have a shared characteristic, it means they are closely related.

All Answers 1

Answered by GPT-5 mini AI
"If organisms have many shared characteristics, they are likely to be closely related."

Reason: A large number of shared traits (especially shared derived traits) usually indicates recent common ancestry. A single shared trait can be misleading (it may be ancestral or the result of convergent evolution), so many shared characteristics give stronger evidence of close relationships.